IdeafintechPakistan

Domestic tokenisation infrastructure for Pakistani issuers

As phones start carrying cards, someone has to run provisioning, token lifecycle and decryption. Right now that would be a foreign processor.

Former founder · September 30, 2026

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The problem

Apple Pay is not live in Pakistan, but the preparation is visible, and every wallet-based credential needs an issuer able to provision tokens, manage their lifecycle, and decrypt in-app payloads. Most Pakistani banks are not set up for it, and the capability currently being built for this market is being built abroad.

The solution

A domestic tokenisation and provisioning platform Pakistani issuers can plug into, so a card going into a phone wallet does not require a foreign intermediary in the middle of a domestic transaction.

Who it's for

Pakistani card issuers, especially mid-size banks without the engineering capacity to build tokenisation in-house.

The market

53 million debit cards in issue. PayPak alone is on more than a quarter of them, and a domestic credit card has been signalled for later in 2026.

How it makes money

Platform fee per issuer plus a per-token charge.

More detail

This is the least glamorous idea on this list and the one with the clearest customer. ## The gap To put a card in a phone wallet, the issuing bank has to do real work: verify the cardholder at provisioning time, issue and manage a device-bound token, suspend and reissue that token when the card changes, and kill it when the phone is lost. For in-app and web payments, someone in the chain must also decrypt the payment payload. Large Pakistani banks can build this. Mid-size ones mostly cannot, and will buy it. The reported testing at several banks at once suggests this work is happening now, bank by bank, in parallel, which is exactly the pattern that produces a platform opportunity. ## The sovereignty argument EBANX announced in September 2026 that it is entering Pakistan and bringing Apple Pay decryption in-house. That is a foreign payments company acquiring a capability for the Pakistani market because nobody here offers it. There is a serious argument — the same one behind PayPak's existence, and behind 1LINK's proposal to mandate domestic cards for government salaries — that this layer should not sit abroad. If the objection to Visa and Mastercard is that domestic transactions should not depend on foreign infrastructure, the same objection applies to tokenisation. ## The honest caveats **It depends on a launch that has not happened.** Apple Pay is not available in Pakistan and Pakistan is not on Apple's supported-countries list. Build this for wallet credentials generally, not for Apple specifically. **It is a long sales cycle.** Selling infrastructure to banks takes years and requires people who have done it before. **Certification is the schedule.** Scheme certification, not engineering, will determine when you can launch.